The present disclosure relates to a robot cleaner, an apparatus and method for recognizing a gesture.
A gesture recognition technology may be pointed out as one of significantly important researches in a human-computer interaction (HCI) or human-robot interaction (HRI) field. It is being actually commercialized for many products, such as moving a screen on the smart phone by a finger tip gesture or controlling the volume or performing a simple command by a gesture using a remote control on the smart TV or by a simple hand gesture.
At present, various researches are being actively performed on such a gesture recognition technology. A gesture recognition method may be divided into two sections, one corresponding to a method of detecting and tracking a hand for recognition and the other corresponding to a method of estimating the general posture (pose) of a user.
The method of detecting and tracking the hand for recognition recognizes a user gesture through a tracked path, detecting and tracking a hand from an image. Since the shape of a hand is not constant, such a method detects the hand based on the color of the hand on a color image or by detecting the trajectory of the hand by the wearing of a glove in specific color or a specific sensor such as a remote control, thus there is a limitation in that there is a need to be a single black and white image or an image sensor needs another sensor or equipment.
On the contrary, the method of estimating the posture of a user recognizes the posture of the user separately with respect to the foreground and the background on a stereo image using two image sensors or recognizes the posture by using a partial detection result of the head, an arm or leg on a single image. However, such a method also has a limitation in that a further image sensor is needed, or it is not easy to recognize on a low quality image or when the size of the user on an image is small.
Since an image obtained by a robot cleaner camera is a low-quality single black and white image such as a 320×240 image, it needs a gesture recognition approach different from the gesture recognition technologies as mentioned above.
Also, in order to be actually applied to the robot cleaner, the calculation of the gesture recognition technology needs to be performed in real time.
A gesture recognition technology using a stereo camera is disclosed in Korean Patent No. 10-1347840 that is a prior literature.